Good benefits to bring you inYou can find excellent people who eventually will leave this company.

Cons

Poor coordination on the information disclosed from the marketing dpt to clients and sales dpt..

Speed wins culture can have impact connotations such as the White Star Line,and the Titanic ..the fast you go eventually you will hit the iceberg so guess your conclusion.

The company can promise you a good level of income which in reality is not easy to achieve due poor management procedures or inexperience team leaders.

There isn't a clear best practice as there is too much favoritism among some 'friends' within the sales team division from which it creates a level of unfairness.

From the sales perspective the customer support efforts are not fast enough neither brings satisfaction to the clients who in time will come back to you very disappointing as you can't go beyond.

There is an existent disparity on the dynamics and pressure between the acquisition dpt and renovation team.

Too much centralize decision from head office doesn't bring value to the UK office.

No available opportunities to move between divisions and learn more from this company. and subsidiaries.

At least for the Tele Sales division level this is not a job for some one who have very good sales experience as soon or later you will realise that the present product service needs more attention. Your values at some point can be compromised.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Management needs urgently to identify motivational strategies to keep sales agents highly driven. This strategy cannot sorely be related about money incentives if you reach a target as it has shown doesn't work for everyone.

Present sales manager needs to be more proactive instead of sending emails back and forth from head office, it needs to hold at least an open session to all sales members to keep the sales division up front. and motivated.

Best practice needs to be enforce among country groups and Team Leaders.

Thanks for your feedback and I’m sorry to hear that you did not have a positive experience at TripAdvisor. We welcome feedback as an organization, and do try to make improvements based on the feedback we hear. We’d love to hear more about your experience-- I know that you’re no longer at TripAdvisor but I strongly encourage you to reconnect with your HR Business Partner or, if you’d prefer, feel free to connect with Steve directly via email to share more detailed feedback.... MoreLess

Smart CEOGlobal leader in the spaceGreat, high-margin, sustainable business modelKnown and trusted brand worldwideGrowingBright, experienced, talented and motivated colleaguesUsually there is good work-life balance, interrupted by bursty but fairly regular insane stretches

Cons

An obsession with measurement leads to missing the bigger point all too often and driving perverse incentives as well as a silo'd, unhelpful org structure. A few examples - a product team wants to experiment with a promising new feature, and suspects it would drive more user engagement. But if that metric has not been previously identified as important or is difficult for someone in sr management to understand, then either the project will get killed or won't be applauded. Meanwhile a minor turn of the screw on a revenue-generating feature will require an all-hands on deck effort ironically without any holistic analysis of the ROI of that effort. In other words, hooray that we raised revenue on that feature by .5% but at what cost (direct cost and opportunity cost)? No one knows, because no one measured it. Further, you have sales or BD teams feverishly optimizing around their singular metric and potentially squandering a customer or partner opportunity for a value trade that is sub-optimal. If teams had better alignment and communication, TA could figure out the best first home for a customer and partner and work out the most logical order to grow that customer and mutual value. Sr management rarely cares about nor addresses this conflicts, it takes a few employees who care about the bigger picture - at direct personal cost to their own short-term success - to effectively do the right thing.

Lots of hiring but without any evident positive effect on the process and products. One eng group has grown 2-3x over the past year, and the release process is totally chaotic and broken. Honestly things worked better when we had a few great engineers vs this mess of people all stepping on each other.

The company constantly says that it is metrics-driven and a meritocracy, but when a team or an individual delivers on and *exceeds* stated goals (in some instances by 50%-300%), there is still unbelievably wide latitude given to management with annual reviews, awarding bonuses, and advancing employees -- coupled with the most opaque system I have ever witnessed. Zero transparency on the review, comp and bonus process. People should not be shocked during their annual reviews, especially when they over-deliver; they should be thanked and properly compensated. And - it should go without saying - employees should have expectations properly set by managers well ahead of the annual review. Much more training is needed here, and it needs to be pushed aggressively as a cultural norm to have open and host feedback with regularity.

Majority of the focus in on a few small teams to eke out teeny tiny improvements to optimize revenue

The weekly reports and product reviews talk about +.3% wins and similar micro-steps, which on the one hand makes sense for this relatively mature company, but also is about as dull as dirt in terms of interesting projects for smart people to work on longer term career objectives

Promotions are virtually nonexistent, but the company is happy to ask already-busy people to take on additional roles during times of turn over.

A lack of interest in retention has led to high turnover by really talented people up and down the seniority spectrum.

There has not been a head of HR in well over a year, which speaks volumes about where the priorities and values rest.

New opportunities (revenue, tech, partner) have no logical evaluation process or home / team. You could take a promising oppty to 3 different teams without any commitment or next steps from them. As a result, Trip misses out all of the time on being early to market in new areas and then turns around and blames people internally for not being part of the "cool new thing." Also very US-centric sr mgmt team POV. If they have heard of the company or technology personally, then they (sometimes) rally behind it, but if it's huge in a foreign market, good luck getting anyone's attention until it's way too late to structure a substantive agreement.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Senior management should launch an aggressive and humble 360 degree audit of itself and the talent at Trip.

This has been said before, but the exec team should take on a listening and learning perspective and assume it has strayed quite seriously in serving the broader team.

Forced ranking systems have been shown to be inherently flawed again and again across the market. What do I do if I have a team of rockstars, do you really want me to force rank someone great into a "needs improvement" category who has outperformed? On what basis?

Metrics have their place, but if they create perverse incentives, gamification of the system, and overly-complex matrices and endless reports that absorb employees' and managers' time (versus the work they should be doing), it's time to reconsider them. Also, if in some cases the reporting systems are unreliable, why are we tying incentives to them at all?

When the financial incentive to refer a new employee outpaces the likely bonus available to an existing employee, you can imagine what kind of motivators and messages that delivers.

1- Imagine Boeing Factory securing an order for a 100+ fleet of new planes. Engineers are in placed, more engineers over hire to cope with the huge order. A structured production and QC process in place but where are the materials? Yet the company berates the workers for not working hard enough in producing the planes2- Fantasy vs reality: Management is not in tuned with the exact real challenges faced on the ground3- Too much fancy footwork dancing to a traditional folklore music tun turning it into a freakshow4- Changes ad-hoc and to the fancy and whims of the upper management5- Poor transparency and communication6- Biasness all around depending on the bosses you work for. Inconsistency in measuring staff and performance7- Company too complacent believing they are the one and only, best of the crop and clients should and will buy from them

--Development--For engineers who are just entering the workforce, TripAdvisor is an awesome place to start a career. The mandate of full-stack development allows engineers to gain crucial experience on many common, though somewhat antiquated, coding frameworks. At TripAdvisor, there are plenty of examples of winning strategies and failing strategies. Observant engineers will learn as much about what not to do in software development as they will about what to do, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Experience in both frontend and backend development, along with guidance from talented fellow engineers, will set engineers up well for their next employment jump.

--Benefits--TripAdvisor employees get a $250 once per year personal travel bonus to help compensate a hotel stay or plane ride. The medical package is good for single employees and decent for employees with families. There is free lunch on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays.

--Culture--There are a lot of very smart people, engineering and otherwise, who are social, friendly, and inviting of newcomers.

Cons

--Environment --TripAdvisor prides itself on moving quickly, our motto is "Speed Wins". Sadly, that motto is more often used to justify making poor design decisions to quickly finish small projects than on identifying new trends within the industry and acting on them. As a result, many sections of the codebase are in disrepair. Poor code from previous projects often hinders developers' ability to achieve the goals of their current projects and are frustrating to encounter on a deadline. Upper-management is also reluctant to spend money and man-power fixing problems that slow down development.

--Compensation--TripAdvisor is a good place to start a career, but it is not a good place to continue one. Hard work is rarely rewarded and the pay raises are relatively flat. Last year's bonus cycle brought modest pay raises that were about on-par with cost of living increases. The realization that new hires are compensated on par with or better than employees who have been around and know the codebase creates morale problems. Many engineers here take this is a signal from management that unseasoned engineers are worth as much as current engineers and that career advancement is limited.

--Benefits--Although the company has offices around the world, engineers are discouraged from visiting them. It isn't that the benefits here are bad, it's that there is nothing that really stands out.

Poor talent management, micro-management from the top leads to lack of empowerment, limited career growth opportunities, lack of integrity and honesty throughout management, very poor recruitment.

Generally - the company is laughably out of touch with current employees and culture - just one read of all the HR responses on Glassdoor touting access to the CEO and that Trip still operates nimbly and like a start up highlights this complete lack of understanding ...It's NOT a start up anymore - it's a 1500+ person company, and the CEOs door is NOT open - and nor should it be. That's the whole POINT of management in large companies, something that Trip now is.

Trip was once a great company but unfortunately, it has not scaled well. First step in solving this is to stop pretending that all 1500+ employees have access to the CEO to give feedback and stop implying that it's the employees fault the company is poorly run. Listen to the reviews and use the feedback to make some speedy changes to your people management.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Create significantly more oversight of senior management to ensure integrity and honesty in upper ranks. Recognition for projects well done not properly distributed and not accurately attributed to key contributors creates mistrust and low morale. Invest in management programs to build leaders within the company and train current managers to professional status. Invest in support teams for your leaders.

HR is corrupted. Even if you provide evidence that your manager is being unfair, plays favorites, manipulates official documents (eg. performance reviews), creates a hostile environment by talking behind your back with your team mates (and is caught doing so), HR does NOTHING about it!! If you don't want to be emotionally abused or bullied, then stay away from this company, well, unless you are good friend with your manager.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Provide proper training to your HR department. What you have allowed managers do to their subordinates is outrageous! Instead of checking the stock market, take a walk in your alleys and make sure the people who made your company successful (those who've been there since the beginning!) are treated fairly and with the respect they deserve

A lot of down-to-earth nice employees to work with...you can make some great friends here. The company will give you some cool swag every now and then and some fun work outings to keep you happy. The benefits are also very good.

Cons

Sales is a complete disaster due to extraordinarily poor management. It's pretty bad when 50% of a sales team leaves in one month (and more to go soon) because of 2 people. A complete mass exodus is going on here! The majority of the junior and senior team are trying to move internally or leave the company all together. Goals are extremely inflated so that it is impossible to collect monthly commission. The big heads simply do not want to share revenue with the little people. Work goes unappreciated.

The structure of the account model is a mess. Territories were taking away...moving to an automated system which has been broken since January. The Speed Wins culture is a joke...it only means that they launch systems without thoroughly checking...resulting in larger messes and more fires to put out that before.

Managers have a closed-door policy. They only know your name when you are making money. The second you have a bad month...don't expect a hello in the hallway.

There is zero upward mobility based on merit. If you suck up to the managers then you will be ok...but if that isn't your style then you are out of luck. You can be a top performer but if the boss doesn't like you for whatever reason than you will rot on your desk for years to come.

So to recap - no organization, terrible leadership, no upward mobility, no commission...and some of the worst base salaries compared to other tech companies from within the industry. It's a great name on the resume but honestly not worth the headache and depression you will get. Also to put the cherry on the top - HR is corrupt and in cahoots with management, so if you every have a serious problem with your manager...don't bother going to HR.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Open your doors and start listening to your employees! Don't promote employees just because you like drinking the same beer with them. Don't talk about employees to your other employees...be professional! Don't be a coward and hide in your office when the entire team is suffering without commission pay and a broken lead model. Promote from within for once (this rarely happens)! Go to some management classes instead of thinking that you already know everything. Management is using tactics from 1952. They like to answer your questions with another question to avoid addressing your concern. Wake up and change!

Doesn't Recommend

Negative Outlook

Disapproves of CEO

TripAdvisor Response

Oct 09, 2014 – Director of HR

Thanks for your candid feedback. We recognize that change can be hard, especially when it comes with shifts in leadership and priorities. However, within a speed wins culture, there’s a continuous need to move fast and reset goals as business needs dictate. Our CEO’s door is always open to discuss your concerns and feedback. Again, thank you for your frank feedback.... MoreLess